Born of Polish parents in Detroit, Charles
(Chuck) Wysocki grew up in a neighborhood
where much of the influence was still "foreign." Perhaps it helped to give him perspective and a special
feeling for America. His was an active and happy boyhood, with all of boyhood's pleasures and anxieties.
He remembers always wanting to draw but his parents
did not share his enthusiasm for the arts, their concern
for him directed toward more reliable sources of earning income. But young Charles' interest in art continued all through high school (Cass Technical) and even through his two-year hitch with the Army.

Service duty over, Wysocki returned to the Polish
community in Detroit and found a job making drawings of tools, nuts, bolts and other car parts for manuals and catalogs. It was not at all his idea of pursuing a career in the arts. Then his brother, also an artist, convinced Chuck to enroll in the Art Center in Los
Angeles. Partly on the GI Bill and partly with the help
of his parents, Charles Wysocki attended art school
where one of his most influential teachers was Jack
Potter, an illustration instructor whose twin gods were
creativity and individualism.

On graduating from art school Wysocki again
returned to Detroit, but two years there convinced him
that he needed the sunshine of California. In Los
Angeles he worked successfully, and happily, as a
free-lance commercial artist for three years. He first
met his wife-to-be, Elizabeth, in an advertising
agency. They began dating immediately, and were
married six weeks later. In the years that followed,
they produced three lovely children-David, Millicent, and Matthew.
They also, in the course of time, moved up into the San
Bernardino mountains and made their home there.

Elizabeth was to become a very strong influence in
Charles Wysocki's life. A graduate from UCLA with the highest
honors in art, Elizabeth had much in common with
Chuck and was able to fully appreciate the talents of
the man she had married. Her family, one of the oldest
to settle the San Fernando valley, had always been
farmers and she, in contrast to Chuck, had grown up
in the country. Her parents welcomed the young man
and he was deeply impressed with the open gentleness, the willingness to work, the cheerful unity of
Elizabeth's family. When Charles Wysocki began to evolve a style of
his own in painting, he found it was linked to his sympathetic feeling for the values of simplicity and
warmth that he observed in his wife's background.

"To this day," Wysocki says, "I feel the serenity of this life,
and it became enhanced on our vacations to New
England. We fell immediately in love with this section
of our country because the pace so closely resembled
our way of thinking - a love for the very small personal closeness of each other's company and being content with 'little' things, happy in activities city folks might find boring."

New England remains the source for many of
Charles Wysocki's favorite subjects. As for other influences, he says of himself, "I was and am probably still
greatly influenced by the paintings of Rousseau,
Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth, Edward Hopper,
Ben Shahn, Norman Rockwell and, of course,
Grandma Moses. But mostly, I believe, by Clara Williamson and Joseph Pickett. I do not think of myself as
being either 'folk' or 'primitive.' I consider myself simply a painter of early American life with a wide mixture
of influences and with a love for the old-fashioned values. If some naivete appears in my paintings, it is
because I planned it that way. And that is undoubtedly
because I would like to live that way myself. I feel that
my relationship to older American folk and primitive
art is like myself. Their simple approach to unsophisticated shapes of pattern which seem to dominate their
paintings is at the same time rather abstract in quality."

In fact, all of Charles Wysocki's paintings are
abstracts in the sense that none of them is a rendition
of an actual place. Just as an author of fiction will take
aspects of many people he knows and meld them into
one realistic whole, so Wysocki utilizes pieces of many
scenes and threads of many feelings, and weaves
them into a symbolic and realistic whole. His paintings
express feelings just as strongly as the imaginary
scenes they depict-the quirky humor, the warmth,
romance, sentimentality, the complex organization,
the delight in pattern and, above all, the love he feels
for America, appear again and again in his richly
detailed, brilliant compositions that celebrate various
aspects of American life from the early 1800s on
through the 1920s and '30s. If the scenes never existed
in actuality, one has the feeling they certainly should
have. Moreover, they are so rich in inventive detail
that one can come back to them again and again, each time delightedly discovering something new.

Wysocki's method of working is painstaking and
methodical. When he gets a concept for a painting, he
first draws the various elements on small pieces of tissue paper. There might be two or three or as many as
dozens of such mini-pieces. These are moved around,
or changed, or developed, or all three, until he is satisfied that he has a balanced composition. He might
then do an overall drawing on tissue and then embark
on color. If the color is not going properly, he will start
all over again to redesign. Sometimes a painting will
take weeks to develop. Sometimes all the many elements fit easily and everything seems to fall into place.

Of his painting methods Wysocki says, 'I received
most of my training as a 'painter' in my own studio under my own plodding direction. I took painting classes but the time spent in these classes was limited and just covered the basics. Time, and what seems like thousands of brush miles later, I still feel I have
just scratched the surface. Another influence that has
affected my personal style is my love for pattern. Fitting patterns together piques my interest."

This is abundantly clear from the home in which
Chuck and Elizabeth live. The house is filled with
Americana-dozens of beautiful antique bottles
(Elizabeth's collection), jars, jugs, crocks, carvings of
birds and other animals, textiles, lace, western
bronzes, paintings, old-time artifacts, dried flowers,
baskets-and unobtrusively comfortable chairs and
sofas, tables and lamps in the right places. The walls
are covered with original art by Wysocki and other artists, including portraits of Washington and other presidents, and
- look closely! - exquisite needlepoint
"paintings" done by Elizabeth. The magnificent quilt
in the master bedroom is her work, too. The whole
house is redolent of love and care and joy, with every
nook and cranny arranged to caress the eye. To say
nothing of the six cats who grace the house with their
presence.

In Chuck's studio, behind his drawing-board, is a
long cabinet along one wall, lined with old tobacco tins
(neither he nor Elizabeth smokes) and facing him is a
wall of glass cabinets filled with a magnificent collection of art books and books on Americana of all kinds.
Yet none of this gives a sense of crowding-simply of
comfort and order and endless riches to delight and
please, relax and stimulate. Their home, clearly as
much Elizabeth's creation as it is Chuck's, is the joint
and joyous expression of much that appears in a
Wysocki painting. They join in celebrating life, and the
world enjoys the gift of that celebration in the work of
Charles Wysocki.